Graham Dunning

Picking things up in the street has been a habit since I was a child. I always had pockets full of nuts and bolts and other interesting bits and bobs I’d collected. When I started compiling sketch books for visual research around 2008/9 a lot of found objects ended up in there, with the occasional playing card. Since 2021 I have been collecting playing cards more deliberately, logging the date and location of discovery. It’s a fun and quite silly project, and I enjoy the ridiculousness of tracking it in a spreadsheet. I’ve just set up a proper page for the project, here, which includes my rules for the game.

Each time I add a card to the collection I take a photo of it too. And I have been posting these on instagram. I’m posting now as I plan to shift this over to my blog instead – makes much more sense to keep the archive in one place on the website. In future I’ll do a quick post here whenever I get a new card – typically it’s every few months, so these posts won’t swamp the feed.

The time in between each finding is quite interesting to me. Estimating at an average of about three months between each allows me to make a guess of how long this process might take. The project is a classic example of the “coupon collector’s problem” as explained really well by this Stand Up Maths video. The problem is that the probability of finding a card that you actually need goes down with each card added to the collection. So, the likelihood of picking up a card only to find it’s a duplicate. Using the maths from Matt’s video I calculated I should have completed the collection in about 25 years. So, when I’m in my mid 60s. This is very much a long-term project.